Hacker News new | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submit login

One moral justification is that the ability to own and profit from intellectual property gives people a powerful incentive to create and share new things.

You seem to be making a statement from first principles: ownership of ideas is absurd. Which, of course, it is. But on the same level of abstraction, who can own land or water or sky? No one.

But of course, to "own" these things is an abstraction for a contract created by the societies we're born into, about what you're permitted to do and what happens to people who break the contract. And in that sense, the argument needs to be about what costs and benefits to society, collectively and individually, come with that contract.




I would tack onto this argument that, in the case of scientific research, the assignment of research intellectual property to journal publishers is a backwards and inappropriate use of intellectual property anyway.


Exactly. Research articles are produced with public money, and scientists do not profit financially from their sale, in fact both scientists and the public want scientific articles to be as widely circulated as possible.

It then seems completely backwards to use intellectual property to limit "unauthorized" redistribution of articles, in the hope that this would help the "authorized" publisher to circulate the articles...


It's worse than that. The sole contribution of the "publishers" is to make content hard to access - both practically, because you need a university library or a private login, and financially, because either your library has to pay a lot of money, or you do. ($45 for a three page PDF? Please...)

While some people try to conflate this with other kinds of IP, this is a completely different process, because research already funded by public money is being kept from the public.

Which means anyone who may be interested in research outside of academia - including startups, corporations, and private entrepreneurs - has to pay through the nose for official access.

And that simply removes money from the ecosystem and puts it in the pocket of the publishers. It doesn't fund new research, it doesn't increase publishing standards, it doesn't keep food on the table for struggling researchers.

It costs a fortune, but adds no social or scientific value at all.


> One moral justification is that the ability to own and profit from intellectual property gives people a powerful incentive to create and share new things.

Very little is new in the tabula rasa sense. Just look at Disney movies. I'm hard pressed to think of any of them that is not derived from something in either contemporary popular culture, or ancient stories.

the notion may have held up when it covered written stories in printed books, and only for a limited (20 years, iirc) period. This because the time window was relatively short, and because the number of book printers were low and thus easily policed.

In this day and age, i can produce a million digital copies of the bible in a second.


> One moral justification is that the ability to own and profit from intellectual property gives people a powerful incentive to create and share new things.

People who own intellectual property are rarely the people who created it. Those people usually get nothing for their efforts beyond a wage.


Agreed. When I worked for a big name mobile phone manufacturer, they offered us £200 or £300 pounds for ideas that got patented. I never gave them my ideas as it seemed so stingy (and getting my own patents would have been time consuming and costly).


Well to make the obvious counterpoint: why is a government-granted monopoly moral just because a perverse business model can be made on it? And it's not even clear peopel woildn't have even greater incentives to share if things weren't locked up in articial silos with all that wasted money to sue people for "stealing" ideas. For example, open source, most science etc has been a gift economy and tremendous progress has been made without the incentives of owning the ideas.


>One moral justification is that the ability to own and profit from intellectual property gives people a powerful incentive to create and share new things.

The free software movement weakens that argument quite a lot.




Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: